I always thought I would be the last person in the world to get anything, but, I thought this once I would treat myself to the all new Windows Vista. So, when it arrived on the 30th of January, I spent five hours backing up all of my crap, ready to install it. If only I knew then that it would put my old Windows XP files into a separate folder on my hard drive…

One thing that Microsoft were focusing the most on was design. And, it was worth it. Aero rocks.

The “Windows Sidebar” is quite handy, although I fail to see the practical side of it as it uses a lot of system resources to run the damn thing. (Not good during gaming)

The usability of Windows Vista is much easier too, for example, they have used the Apple Mac OS 10’s idea and put search boxes in the corner of every window, making it easier to find the stuff that you want to find. Well, this is all very well, but sometimes it takes a while for windows to index your files, and god knows how much of your system resources it does doing it. I must say though, it is quick at finding the files you want - for me it usually digs them up within a second, which to me (who is used to the old windows search feature) is awesome!

I’m not sure quite what Microsoft were trying to pull off with the style of Windows Media Player in XP, as it completely contrasted with the default “blue” windows theme, and didn’t really fit in. But, in Vista however, they have just about managed to pull it off. (see below)

There are also a lot of cool features that have been added, for instance the “Windows DVD Maker”, which is a useful tool for quickly creating video DVD’s of your video or photo collections. Another example Flip 3D, which (if the adverts are anything to go by) is the coolest feature of windows vista. Flip 3D lets you move through your programs (with live previews) so that you can quickly find the one you want. Quite handy, although Microsoft decided to keep the windows XP “cool switch” on alt+tab, and assign flip 3d to winkey+tab.

All in all, I would not go back to Windows XP. I have had some minor hiccups with Vista, (mainly incompatible drivers which left me with a blue screen and a memory dump), 99.9% of the time it has worked smoothly, and is a joy to use.